


For the Lonely Hearts

by CousinNick



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Jean is kinda a grumpy hermit, M/M, Marco is basically a hunting lumberjack it's great, Trans, Trans Jean is best Jean, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-15
Updated: 2014-03-15
Packaged: 2018-01-15 19:35:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1316707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CousinNick/pseuds/CousinNick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loneliness was Jeans constant companion and best confidant in the years that he traded his woman's skirts for his dead husbands leather boots and sawed off shotgun...but that was until he met the trapper in the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Lonely Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Carsan for editing and adding to this fic on such short notice, you are amazing <3

1882, and the silver mines stretched between California and Nevada were still being pumped full of dynamite, still being sawed off by the tip of a pick, and still causing old and young men alike to go venture into the very gaping pits of hell itself to retrieve a wispy thread of silver no realer than a dream.  
  
Jean had moved out onto the dry parched land that had become the Anglo-Saxon miner’s home ten years prior when he was just a young 17 year old thing, thinner than a corn stalk and with bright corn silk hair to match that fell long over the front frock of his dress. For that was when he still found himself being constrained by the many shifts and skirts of a woman’s dress—when he still found himself _a woman._  
  
The land that was as ghostly as his new husband's eyes was also terribly lonely and could scarcely even feed the wild mustangs that ran like shifting plates of earth, the very sunset that rode on their backs burning a white man the color of the dunes. But Jean didn’t mind the loneliness, he reveled in it. The loneliness was his constant companion.  
  
When his husband came back from the shafts at dawn and smelled of charcoal, kerosene, and sweat, Jean ignored his still ashen black hands pawing at his young wife. Jean made it his duty to resist his husband’s advances at all costs, and usually his husband was too tired most nights to bother him. He had clutched and guarded what he had imagined made him a man, for why should his husband try and make Jean submit if not for want of that? Jean feared each night that he would lose the grip he had on the loneliness and subsequently what made him not so much as live, but survive, in the barren wasteland that his husband had given him as a home.  
  
It wasn’t that his husband was a bad man, he just had no knowledge of the aches and pains that came to Jean each time he had to don his frock smeared with dish water stains, each time he had to pray to God when his eyes caught the moon in the small miners cabin to never be with child, to betray his husbands piety with the notion that he had in fact married a person with a pervasive identity.  
  
His husband was kind enough, and the two of them got along and during the time of their marriage were grand friends who smoked from the same packed pipe, ate at the table together as snug as two friends elbow to elbow, and when his husband wasn’t tired, they embraced each other in the coolness of the summer nights. It wasn’t bad—but Jean was still unhappy, and never once told his husband that he feared his husband had married...a man.  
  
He himself was the child of French and German immigrants and knew that the only prospect for a youth like him with domesticated skills and hardly a want of adventure was to be wedded to a miner and moved forth like a yoked ox to a homestead that he himself would have to care for and mend. Jean was a perfect candidate, he could clean a cabin, he had memorized his bible hymns, and he had no want for stimulation in the form of company. It was no wonder, Jean used to look back on his first marriage, that his husband was so eager to marry him.  
  
He had lived in the state of California for nearly ten years, and for seven glorious years had lived it alone. The third year he was granted his loneliness and a sense of sole guardianship for his identity as a man, though it pained him though to have it come at the cost of a good man’s life. In the third year in winter, he had gotten the news somberly that his husband had asphyxiated due to a foulness of air in the mines deep and shuttering hollow, the young lad with his cap in his hand looking so mousy and tense, as if he was waiting for Jean to burst into tears. Jean felt bad for disappointing the boy with his lack of dramatics, taking the given mild compensation and sympathy for the death and closed the door in the boy’s charcoal smeared face. He remembered stumbling to the small bed they both shared and laying down in its dent and crying softly—guiltily rejoicing that he was free and mourning for the loss of a friend.  
  
Using the money and shedding his sorrow, he moved as far as he could away from the mines and around the rough pine forests of the farthermost western state. He moved to where he could live in peace, shoot game, make himself a cabin, and stay there till he died, truly happy and alone.  
  
The place he'd chosen was perfect, it was thick with bob-cat forests and the sound of the coyotes and the threat of the bears with coats as dark as the night sky were on the cusp of every ridge. No one would dare follow the widow now turned bachelor to venture into the wilds where he resided, like one of those orange monarchs that rustles itself up from a cocoon to travel again to a land much better from where it was held captive in transformation. He was completely alone, and he thanked god every day for it.  
  
The first thing he did with his new found freedom into the wilds was to squat bare foot into a shallow river that was muddied with silt and guttered with deadened willow leaves, and piss into the river that was ice cold. He groaned a noise of heavenly pleasure as he relieved himself, grinning at the controversy of it all. Next, he grabbed a pair of sewing scissors that had been a wedding present from his sister, and shorn his hair as short to his scalp as he could manage, the river swirling between his toes as good as any looking glass.  
  
He turned the skirts of his three dresses he had to his name into breeches and vests, wearing the now torn and slimed half of his night-gown as a medieval tunic of sorts. The boots of his late husband were big and barely fit him but he made do with them, choking the laces up tight to his ankles and tramping around in them as he built his sorry looking one room cabin slowly and sluggish, for his husband had died at a horrible time when the last of the winter’s snow was still frosted each morning along the oily hide of his makeshift cow skinned tent and the bare bones of the cabin. That husband of his, Jean had huffed with fond laughter each morning, could still rouse him to frustration even in death.  
  
It was at a year pass that Jean could finally comfortably live in the cabin that he had built and claimed his own, tending to a meager garden like his mother taught him and shooting game like his father and late husband taught him. He lived each night bundled in the miss-matched furs of coyote and mountain lion he stitched for his blanket, slurping joyously at the grainy tar-like tins of coffee he brewed to stave off the early morning chill. It was how he came to finally enjoy his life and become re-acquainted with his old friend loneliness. That was, until he heard the sound of a gun blasting through the mountain.  
  
On that early morning, Jean shook with a start, still awake in the morning cold. He turned toward the streaking glass of the only window the cabin boasted, the glass paneling he himself had stolen from a broken down coach in a junk heap back towards the mines.  
  
His mind had committed to memory the sizzling sound of dynamite going off, he had encountered that noise well enough from the mining camps—but this noise was not the stick of an explosive, but was in fact a rifle, and a powerful one at that. The sound of the shells popping made Jean frown, the guns make and noise inappropriate to use in this territory that did not boast any bison or mule deer, only scraggly coyotes, wild cats, and the occasional squirrel. Whoever was shooting up near the ridge was either chasing shadows or a fool on purpose.  
  
Grumpier than all hell, Jean threw the blankets off of him, shoving one of the last of his ruined skirts—a pale rose colored wedding dress that he was turning into the lining of a fur coat—into a trunk under his bed. With bare feet creaking, he walked over to the window and blinked at the light. The sun was low in the trees, hiding and shy with its yellow hue as the spring wing rusted the still bony aspens just shivering in the air.  
  
Jean narrowed his eyes and dove for the boots at the front of the door, sticking his feet snug into the worn leather that felt like home. He grabbed his own hunting gun, something he had pawned off with one of his late husband’s smoking pipe, and tugging the still unfinished fur coat tighter round his collar, went off the creaking steps of his porch.  
  
Shouldering the strap of his gun, he snuck onto the first crumbling untorn of shale at the entry to the woods only to hear the blast of a rifle again, the sound coming off to the west, away from Jean’s cabin, but still close enough to him to make him annoyed. A grimace came over his face.  
  
Hiking up the pass for about five minutes, the cold making his teeth chatter, he crouched flat to the ground on instinct from the sound of another round of shots, accompanied by a curse and another clink of a box and dampened box of bullets. Jean frowned, feeling he had enough of this noise that was reminding him more and more how damn resilient civilization was to find him.  
  
“Boy, the fuck do you think you’re doin’, shootin’ holes in my pine and scaring away all the grouse—ya’ know, the suitable animals to eat?” Jean shouted with a huff, standing up awkwardly on the edge of the upturned and rooted land that this young hunter was blasting to bits.  
  
Jean was suddenly met with the wide eyes of another man, bushy with an unkempt beard that he sure as hell wasn’t wearing for fashion, as black as a bear’s fur, his face dark even in the midst of the warming sun. His clothes didn’t fit him none either, all rotting off his body in bald heaps and thinned strips and Jean felt a pang of pity for him. The man looked startled too, his elbows sucked into his armpits as he fiddled with the gun, arms shaking.  
  
Jean soured his face and stomped up to him in his brashness, grabbing the gun from his still wide opened face, his eyes that were sure to be the color of coffee were almost milky corpse-like. Jean was sure it was nothing a good place at the fire and some food in his gut wouldn't fix, as the man wasn’t too weakened from hunger to stop looking for his meal all together.  
  
“Let's get you down this damn mountain, boy,” Jean growled, helping the other man crawl over the jutting bulbs and roots that fraught underneath the muddied patches at the trunks of trees.  
  
“My name’s not boy, it’s Marco.” The man, and it was that Jean realized he was indeed a man, spoke. Introduced as Marco, his voice was deep and it shook Jean for a minute in its clarity—no man starved from hunger and lacking of good clothes on his back should have ever spoken so calmly. But then Jean came to really look at the man, realizing that his body, when not bowed by hunger, would have been a bit taller than Jean’s own, and a hell of a lot stronger.  
  
Jean huffed, swinging the butt of both guns to rest under his armpit, his other arm steadying Marco to his side. “Fine, Marco. Let’s get you down this mountain and make you a good bowl of food—I sure as hell can’t promise you a wild cat stew you seem to be fond of, but I'm sure a nice strew of rabbit will be to your liking just the same.” Jean hummed with a noise of amusement that had the other’s decrepit line of a mouth smiling softly as he followed the other down the root of the mountain and to the low-heaped cabin below, their joined steps nearly spooking Jean as they descended. He had forgotten what the sound of another’s footfalls even sounded like.  
  
The spring passed by with the company of the other and Jean found that he himself couldn’t mind that he had befriended someone other than the something that was loneliness. Marco had regained his strength nicely over the course of late night meals and early breakfasts accompanied by afternoons packing and smoking pipes. During that time both men had grown easy at the lips with smiles and Marco himself had grown portly around the middle from Jean’s cooked bacon and fire-pit roasted potatoes. This pleased Jean to no end, delighting in the fact that he, a thin little weasel, had a made a friend with a kindly grizzly bear. Jean had to admit as he occasionally stopped to watch the other suck at his pipe, making the embers in the bowl glow, that his new guest was as fine as a dandy and kind as one too. Marco still had a face roughened with coarse black hair from erratically taking a razor to his cheeks, and his beard didn’t match the oiled curls of his head, but he was still fine as ever when he bathed and had a few good months of cooking on his bones.  
  
The man with the face the color of pine bark then slowly over the course of a few nights, relinquished the story of how he came to be on Jean’s doorstep in quiet words that caused Jean to strain his ears to hear the soft soothing voice.  
  
“I’m...I was, the son of a fur trapper, and the sibling to two boys. The eldest went to the academy, the youngest to college, and I was tasked with going with my papa hunting and trapping.”  
  
Jean had learned that on a job in Washington, Marco and his father separated in order to ready pine-sapling traps for moose and deer, and that when they met up after the season thawed a bit, his father had lost a few toes to frost bite and had gotten a nasty chill. The physician said he would not in fact die, but that his hunting days were over. Marco saw him off on a train back to the warm climate of their original homestead, remembering all the eyes pouring into him as he stood dusty and grimy on the train platform to wave away his old man with a hardened heart and shoulders rolling with pelts stiff and caked with mud. “I went out the next week on a flea-bitten mare to go check my traps, but the damn skittish thing spooked and I was thrown off, she went down the ridge and I did my best to track her but, well, the hours turned to days and the days to weeks...that’s when you found me, I suppose.” His voice was tight as he said the last of his shortened tale, sucking at the spoon coated in rabbit stew gravy that Jean gave to him. That was the last Marco talked about his past life. He wasn't exactly quiet and his voice was more than infectious, but slowly they came to an agreement of what not to talk about. Jean didn't talk about his past life, Marco didn't talk anymore about his, and so they got along just fine.  
  
It was the day, a lazy early afternoon in summer when the shadowy patches of beech and pine still sheltered a few piles of snow near to melting, that things changed forever.  
  
Jean and Marco had been hunting and hopping like fools around the meadows, trying to collect grasshoppers that they could skewer on their fishing hooks as bait, as they had a hankering to go visit the old water hole a few miles down the property.  
  
The little green bugs were jittering as all hell and near impossible to catch, but the two men found fun in the chore anyway, and soon took to leaping around as easily as frogs.  
  
It was when one tanned olive one bounded to the left of Jean and the right of Marco that the two clumsy oafs met in a lunging clash of speed, entangling together and heaving with laughing, rubbing their sore elbows and dusty knees. Rolling on the dry tall grass, Jean himself would not quit laughing, the whole childishness of it all tickled his sides just too much.  
  
At once Marco took to beaming, overcome with a fond warmness that he was sure was not from the heat of the summer sun above. Thinking himself clever and boldly romantic, he smiled down at the other nice and brightly before he leaned down and kissed the other man softly, his lips as light as a brush of a butterfly’s wing on the other’s.  
  
Jean was the first to start with a fright, a yelp in his throat that caused a few cackling blue jays ahead to startle and take flight. Marco’s brown gaze widened in hurt confusion, as dazed as the day Jean first found him trying to make a meal out of pine trunks and boulders.  
  
“You think I’m some girl to steal a kiss from?!” Jean called out with disbelief, Marco still on his knees before the other.  
  
Marco felt his throat constrict, wild with confusion now, and not much else. “No, that’s not—”  
  
“Well, I ain’t no missus for you or any man to go a courtin’!” Jean yelled, and the words he spoke hurt to say, hurt to realize as he scuttled to his feet and took off toward the bottom of the mountain, Marco watching him with a heart heavy, his big hands pooled in his lap. He watched Jean march with frustration past the cabin and head towards the lazy river, and the freckled man knew the invitation of joining was not in the air.  
  
Returning back to the cabin with a heart more broken down than a train’s engine that wouldn't start, Marco sat against the bed that Jean had given to him, the other sleeping on a grass stuffed mattress on the floor, more concerned about Marco’s well-being than his own. Marco buried his nose in the crook of his elbow and sighed, wondering why God had made him an abhorrent and why God had made Jean so damn angry.  
  
He moped and grumbled a few more minutes just because he could, the cabin cold and unwelcoming, as neither of them had bothered to keep the stove fire going. Shivering, even as the summer sun filtered through the window and opened door, Marco rolled over on his side, the flare of his nostrils scattering dust and lint every which way. Fingers hooking on wood, he dragged forth a cedar chest that he had seen Jean always bringing forth to procure blankets for the both of them when the wind got especially hellish at nightfall.  
  
Hugging the large chest to him, Marco clicked open the two heavy brass locks in the shape of hearts with holes in them, the latch fitting snug against the gaps.  
  
Heaving it open he began to rifle through the other’s possessions to find that old fur coat of two halved coyote skins the other always seemed to wear. He knew he should be mindful that he was in fact rummaging through the other man’s possessions, but Marco just couldn’t bother to mind, he was still so very sore at Jean for his behavior. That son of a bitch was pricklier than a god damn porcupine.  
  
Thumbing at old and torn playing cards, scooping up a handful of wooden carved animals Jean seemed to have amused himself to making, Marco found his eyes widening with the first moment of confusion. In a bag that he shamelessly opened, he found strips of cloth, some patterned some not, but all the same longed size with specks of what looked like blood that had been tried and failed to be furiously washed out, as if the bits of cotton were handkerchiefs for bloody noses. Tucking them back and out of the trunk without a moment of disgust for the blood, he next found a small wooden woman’s comb, fine and in good use with not a tooth broken. Next was a pair of silk slippers, the bottoms worn all to hell and the stitching plucked almost nervously. Marco frowned and dug further till he came to a blanketed heft of cloth that looked to have been stuffed carelessly towards the very bottom, the fur coat he had been searching for in the first place snug against its side, as if the two were clutching at each other.  
  
Without a thought, Marco yanked the cloth up and over of the lip of the trunk and stared at amazement at the lumpy shape of a dress, most of the bodice seams having been ripped out and re-worked as if to hide the clothing's identification, but Marco could still see it as it was. The rose coloring of the dress undoubtedly once belonged to someone close to Jean, perhaps even a late wife.  
  
Marco bit his lip, and threw the hideous lint smattered dress back in the trunk with a pained noise.  
  
Of course, it all made sense now, that was why Jean was so angry. Marco had probably reminded him of his wife, or had seemed to be trying to replace her. Marco grabbed his knees up in his arms and scowled at the open trunk for a good few minutes, torturing himself with the image of what Jean’s wife probably looked like and how Jean more than likely still adored and loved her. She was surely dead, passed and gone up to heaven, and Marco jealously painted her as dark haired and beautiful, soft-spoken and kind, everything he thought he was that Jean would fancy.  
  
He stayed by the brim of that trunk and sighed and wallowed and did everything his heart permitted him to, which resulted in traitorous pain. He began to grow more and more spiteful at this imagined bride that had spoiled Marco’s good graces even before he met Jean, and the sourness on his freckled face was the first thing to greet Jean, who came back to the cabin looking sorrow and remorseful. Marco clenched his teeth and vowed he would have no pity.  
  
“I know I can’t be her, but at least let me try to make you love me.” Marco spoke as he looked up and saw the now astonished eyes of Jean as he stared at the man pooled about his most secretive and dangerous belongings. “Marco,” Jean whispered, about to accuse the very man he had come to apologize to, of what horrors he had just unleashed.  
  
“Who was she? I presume she was your wife but where you very close to her? Did she kiss you as kindly as I did? Could she ever kiss you as kindly as I did?” Marco’s voice was hurt and spoiled by selfishness that even he cringed at. He frowned and his eyes began to well as he laid about the dead woman's belongings, for she was indeed a dead woman. Jean had taken pains to ensure that.  
  
“Marco, you don’t understand.” Jean breathed and his breath was like fire and it burned, it made Marco growl with pain.  
  
“I do understand, I understand perfectly that you’d rather cling to the skirts of a dead woman than to accept that there is a man, in the actual flesh, who would gladly hold you.” Marco snarled and his voice made Jean see red, his brash stupidity taking ahold of him. “I hated that woman, Marco, I hated her and I killed her.” He roared and Marco blinked, Jean only now realizing what he had done as the other looked at him as if he was truly afraid now.  
  
Jean panicked at the words he had spoken, watching Marco slowly sit up with a widened gaze that slowly flickered to the door in the hopes of running away from the hostile situation that had erupted. “Marco, no, I...Marco, please,” Jean bit his lip in frustration. Marco had withdrawn his breath, not saying a word as his throats constriction would not give him such a luxury.  
  
Jean felt his body shake as he ran forth to the cedar trunk and grabbed at the clothing and the combs and the little tiny rings that his mother had given him to wear that even he could not pawn off. As he rooted and grappled like a mad man Marco had fled the cabin with a lunge that likened his movements to a spooked deer. He jumped off the porch, hearing his blood pound in his head as he began to walk fast paced away from the cabin so as not to be caught by the man he surely assumed to be a murdering lunatic.  
  
He almost made it to the copse of aspen trees, their green leaves shimmering and making a racket so loud that it cause Marco to whine in pain, before he heard a crash of glass. With a hunter’s instinct, he immediately turned his head to the sound. Eyes looking down his nose, his gazed fixed itself upon a shattered glass picture frame on the summer scorched earth.  
  
Jean was leaning against the small sunken in porch, his body looked to having been thrown to the lean-to pole, eyes wild and wet as he stared at Marco, begging him silently to peer down at the picture frame, as if it was the key to solving this entire mishap.  
  
Marco swallowed and kept his eyes flatly on Jean’s as his hand shook. He fished the dry stiff board of the photo with a flinch, dragging it out of its shattered glass cage that glimmered in the sun like misshaped diamonds. Marco swallowed hard in his throat and knelt down to better inspect the photo, fixing his gaze on the portrait of two equally miserable people in their finery.  
  
The person to the left was weighed down heavily by his frown, his mustache dropped low over his tight lips. His bride fared no better at hiding her displeasure. A young thing with long curled hair at the front of her dress, she had a frown equal to a bob-cats snarl and it almost made Marco laugh. Almost.  
  
The pair was interesting indeed and Marco couldn’t tear his eyes away from them as if he was being given all the answers to his questions in this one flimsy black and white photo, only he could not stand to reason the answer... until he noticed the dress the bride was adorned with.  
  
Even though the picture was in flattened and muted gray he couldn't bear to lie to himself that the collar, high with lace and drops of patterned snow-cap flowers was familiar to him, like a dream that he was violently confronting. The color was soft and delicate, like some rosy red or pink, the stitching’s delicate.  
  
It was then that he realized the woman in the picture was dead, for this was the elusive wife’s dress that Marco had so vehemently came across.  
  
Flipping the portrait in his shaking hands he came to a date scrawled in loping curved penmanship, 1872. The bride in the photo looking no older than a girl and her husband a gruff man in his early twenties—and yet Marco knew them both to be dead. He could discern as much from the way the dust still stubbornly stuck to the shattered chunks of glass and from the fretted and torn corners of the picture, as if someone had poured themselves over it during long hours and contemplated its poisoned depiction. It then became that Marco felt sick with rage all over again—the picture had poisoned him as well.  
  
“I killed her.” Jean stuttered sickly, his usually gruff voice mellowed with the sweetness of pain and relief. It was the relief in his tone that led Marco to fully understand what the man before him had done, and Marco’s deep eyes calmed as the seconds that he held the picture in silence took over his entire being. Then, he spoke.  
  
“Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God, John 1:11.” Marco whispered to Jean, his hands deftly finding purchase on the picture before, with a satisfying pressure, he ripped the entire thing in half with a long stroke.  
  
Jean let out a soft shuddering sigh, as if the ruining of the picture had given him freedom, something he had never thought he was allowed to possess. Not even all the wilderness around him, not even the wide open blue sky above and the untended earth below, could make him feel freer.  
  
Jean willed the tears not to fall and Marco did not permit him to cry, letting Jean know in the wandering back to the cabin that all was well and would continue to be. He let him know by the soft sigh of his voice, in the warmth of his brown hands that gently molded to hold Jean like a lover would, like a lover did, that now was a time for Jean to live for himself with his secrets destroyed and buried.  
  
...  
  
Marco had let Jean lead him to the bed as if they were newlyweds and this was their wedding night—though, Jean found himself smiling, who’s to say it couldn’t be?  
  
Jean’s shirt had peeled to his body with the sweat of summer and Marco made special care to rid the other of it, but not before he himself laid stark naked on the bed that they knew they would equally share for the rest of their nights together. The blankets had been kicked off with a motion of delighted laugher, Marco’s back at the cool sheets that smelled of wild lavender and dust.  
  
Jean marveled at the other’s body, finding he had forgotten what the particular bodies of a majority of males were blessed with. Marco’s body was soft as mounded earth and the color of it too, warm and tasting of the pipe scented brand of tobacco he smoked and Jean found he loved it entirely.  
  
Looking down at the other man he felt his stomach curl and jump, a sign he knew well to mean arousal, a motion he had scarcely ever entertained, even during his time alone and with only his hand for relief.  
  
But here was Marco, laying down before him and grinning with a smile as white as a fishes belly, charming and disarming all the same. Jean decided he’d grin too, surprised by how easily the motion came to him, so naturally...so sweetly.  
  
They teased each other with their touches and caresses, Marco letting Jean have his fill of traversing and knowing Marco’s body till he could remember where ever patch of freckles sprung up and where the man’s ticklish spots—at his left hip, under both his knees, and at the crook of his neck—were.  
  
When Jean leaned in to give him a kiss, he felt the other’s stubble and giggled, a voice that had Marco sighing, as if the noise pleasured and pleased his ears—so Jean did it again and again, laughing and giving the man underneath him as many kisses as they both pleased. Some were soft and gentle and made the two bashful, but the others were anything but coy, instead heated like a wildfire that consumed them easily. They slowly began to roll around the bed with these kisses, and Jean found that they were steadily becoming his favorite.  
  
They had no want to make complications later, so they contented themselves to touching and rutting, Jean dominating Marco with the cusp of his teeth biting into the other’s stomach and chest, the other arching perfectly with a breathless laugh and groan.  
  
Marco’s large hands guided themselves to Jean’s thighs, snuggling himself behind the other softly and shyly, both of them feeling themselves acting like youths besotted with the idea of the other.  
  
They both were careful, Marco confessing in a breathy voice that trembled more than shook with his clumsy excitement that he had never done this before, with a man or with a woman. At those words Jean had felt himself relax against the other, grabbing his hands and gently placing one at the jutting bone of his hip and the other close to his chest so that he could kiss the knuckles. Marco buried his nose against the shell of Jean’s ear at the gesture, finding comfort in the other’s embrace as he slowly began to rock back and forth.  
  
Jean was surprised by how choked his breath was becoming, his cheeks hot where they were pressed against the lumpiness of the grass-stuffed pillow. Marco was eager and his lack of skill was hardly a nuisance, as Jean found the slickness between his thighs was more than enjoyable, and made his body arch and sigh back fluidly with the other man soft thrusts.  
  
The bed rocked with their love making, the warm summer sun making them joyfully lethargic and slow as they melted into each other.  
  
The sound of Marco’s harried pants urged Jean to be bold with his pawing and grabbing, rolling over to the surprise of the other to face his lover with a grin. Grabbing at Marco’s neck and face, Jean kissed his lips till they were shined with spit and red as the juice from a cherry pie, the kiss sticky and just as sweet.  
  
Marco was confident with his final thrusts, his gentle nature that had been sunken into his very bones suddenly waning as he grabbed Jean’s hip with neediness, his kisses greedy as he sucked at the skin at Jean’s shoulder.  
  
Jean growled happily at the motion, snaking his arms over the other’s shifting and working hips to clutch at the plumpness of the other ass, rolling the flesh between his fingers and palming at it delightfully. Marco groaned in the other’s shoulder for the briefest of seconds, stuttering his movements as the other grabbed almost painfully at his backside. Jean himself could feel the heat of the other’s flaring blush against his skin.  
  
They had begun to sweat profusely, their rutting messy and wet as the late summer sun slanted against their body and warmed them into looseness, limber bodies better suited for lazily rutting.  
  
Their breaths were ragged and growing louder by the minute, their moans mixing with the short gasps of air the burned hot with the seasons dryness.  
  
Jean might have blushed at his obscenity were it not for the tightening of his belly that pooled warm, and he gripped at Marco’s ass with a sudden need and rocked the larger man’s body into him. Jean reveled in the slapping of their sweat soaked skin that smelled of their wet lust.  
  
Marco bit at Jean’s shoulder but his desperate whine still rang true in Jean’s ears, Jean grinning for the briefest of seconds before his lover growled back. Marco ground his hips just at the right angle, and it suddenly became so hot, too hot, and Jean threw his head back, the column of his throat exposed and decorated already with so many bite marks. His hips rose up sharply to meet the bluntness of Marco’s cock, his body pulsing as if he was on a coil that had his toes curled. He spasmed one last time before he slumped back down and into the other’s waiting arms, feeling the hot messy twitch of Marco’s relief on his stomach and between his thighs. It pooled warm and soft against his skin and Jean found he was greedy for the feeling.  
  
“…S...sorry...” Marco breathed shallowly, still trying to catch his breath that he was more than positive Jean had stolen right out of him.  
  
Jean hummed a chuckle; quite aware that Marco was still slightly rocking into the other’s hip though his dick had long grown flaccid between the other’s hairy thighs.  
  
Jean grabbed Marco’s face closer to his, kissing him messily and feeling the other’s mouth hot to the touch, Marco making a pleased whine that was so out of place for a man of his size.  
  
Sleepily and half lidded, Jean slid out from the bed to firmly latch the door, huffing with amusement as he realized Marco was unabashedly watching his nakedness with a look of shameless want. Jean found that he no longer disliked such a look of want on a man, Marco’s dark eyes lust blown and making Jean feel happily desired.  
  
Upon returning back to the bed the other grabbed and held him firmly to his chest with a rumble of happiness that had Jean’s lips sliding into an easy smile. Resting his chin against the other’s sun-heated shoulder, he sighed happily, content to never be alone again.  
  
...  
  
In the morning, when they woke up soft with sleep and gnawed with aches from their love making, they got a big empty sack of flour and dumped all the things that Jean had no use for—his slippers and combs and hair ribbons, an decided that a trip to the trading out post was in order.  
  
They did away with the straw mattress at the floor and in town Jean sold the small rickety bed, buying a saw and hammer, nails and rope to make him and his new husband a bed all their own, decorated with the pelts of the furs Marco could catch in the summer and winter.  
  
They even wandered, like young people often do when struck with love, to the outpost near the mining town to get their picture taken, together, to replace the old one that had stained itself with ugly memories and ugly thoughts.  
  
Grinning as they jostled each other affectionately past the elms to their cabin, crisp picture in hand, Jean found that he himself had never gazed upon a grander pair of two people so much in love in all his life.


End file.
